The movie Inherit the Wind, is being shown once again; last time I saw
it, Ronald Reagan was shot the next day and I thought about Reagan for
he had taken on the likes, of a Darwin......in this one scene, Brady was
lying on the floor dead, his bald head was all you could see - the next
day when I turned on the news, there lie another Brady .....all you
could see was his bald head - for Reagan had been shot....
So they say in the bible "he who troubles his own house shall inherit
the wind, and a fool shall be servant to the wise in heart".
So what fools we mortals be, where we have two vice presidents running
for President
This story I ran across in looking up the Monkey Trial.....note the
similarities between the killers Loeb and and his lover, and Klebold and
his alleged lover? Works of famous authors alleged to have influenced
Loeb.......famous tape made by son of FBI agent of preview of what is to
come - Trench Coat Mafia killing their little classmates?
Kids killing kids? Were all these kids on drugs? Klebold's
grandfather has the Yassenoff Foundation - good thing to shuffle excess
funds to like Jean Dixon had her foundation and had sticky fingers until
J. Edgar and the IRS nailed her.....
So this is old story - the story of Clarence Darrow is a good one for he
was an athiest it is said, and any time someone can knock a Christian
thee days, its fair game?
Gore married into the Schiff family.....big money here, and you talk
about the price of buying America? Why should Gore stoop to such
levels as getting involved with Golden Buddas and Chinese funding if his
is like his running mate, a holy man - Born Again Christian and religion
is not a test for qualification for any office in America.
Zen Buddism is nice = wonder they did not run a Red Chinese for Veep?
There are some strange parallel lines between Littleton and this case
and by whom were they brainwashed?
Saba
�
�
Crime Scene Map
Famous American Trials
Illinois v. Nathan Leopold
and Richard Loeb
1924
The Glasses
The Confession
Darrow's Summation
State's Summation
Leopold, Darrow, and Loeb during the arraignment
Decision and Sentence
Biographies
In Leopold's Words
Leopold & Ornithology
An Introduction
by
Prof. Douglas Linder
�Send Comments��� Famous Trials Homepage���� Link
�Photos
Bibliography
Compulsion�
THE LEOPOLD AND LOEB TRIAL: A BRIEF ACCOUNT BY DOUGLAS O. LINDER�
(c)1997
��� Few trial transcripts are as likely to bring tears to the eyes
as that of the 1924 murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold.
Decades after Clarence Darrow delivered his twelve-hour long plea to
save his young clients' lives, his moving summation stands as the most
eloquent attack on the death penalty ever delivered in an American
courtroom. Mixing poetry and prose, science and emotion, a world-weary
cynicism and a dedication to his cause, hatred of bloodlust and love of
man, Darrow takes his audience on an oratorical ride that would be
unimaginable in a criminal trial today. Even without Darrow in his
prime, the Leopold and Loeb trial has the elements to justify its
billing as the first "trial of the century." It is not surprising that
the public responded to a trial that involved the kidnapping and murder
of a fourteen-year old boy from one of Chicago's most prominent
families, a bizarre relationship between two promising
scholars-turned-murderers, what the prosecutor called an "act of
Providence" leading to the apprehension of the teenage defendants,
dueling psychiatrists, and an experienced and sharp-tongued state's
attorney bent on hanging the confessed killers in spite of their
relative youth.
��� The crime that captured national attention in 1924 began as a
fantasy in the mind of eighteen-year old Richard Loeb, the handsome and
privileged son of a retired Sears Roebuck vice president. Loeb was
obsessed with crime. Despite his high intelligence and standing as the
youngest graduate ever of the University of Michigan, Loeb read mostly
detective stories. He read about crime, he planned crimes, and he
committed crimes, although none until 1924 were crimes involving
physical harm to a person. ( Darrow and Leopold later saw Loeb's
fascination with crime as form of rebellion against the well-meaning,
but strict and controlling, governess who raised him.) For Loeb, crime
became a sort of game; he wanted to commit the perfect crime just to
prove that it could be done.
���� Loeb's nineteen-year old partner in crime, Nathan Leopold,
was interested in ornithology, philosophy, and especially, Richard Loeb.
Like Loeb, Leopold was a child of wealth and opportunity, the son of a
millionaire box manufacturer. At the time of their crime, the brilliant
Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago and was planning
to begin studies at Harvard Law School after a family trip to Europe in
the summer. Leopold already had achieved recognition as the nation's
leading authority on the Kirtland warbler, an endangered songbird, and
frequently lectured on the subjects of his ornithological passion. As a
student of philosophy, Leopold was attracted to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's influence on early twentieth century academics was powerful,
and the merits of ideas contained in books like his Beyond Good and Evil
were fiercely debated in centers of learning like the University of
Chicago. Leopold agreed with Nietzsche's criticism of moral codes, and
believed that legal obligations did not apply to those who approached
"the superman." Leopold's idea of the superman was his friend and lover,
Richard Loeb.
���� Loeb and Leopold had� an intense and stormy relationship.
At one time Leopold contemplated killing Loeb over a perceived breach of
confidentiality. This relationship, described by Darrow as "weird and
almost impossible," led the two boys to do together what they almost
certainly would never have done apart: commit murder. Motives are often
unclear, and they are in this trial. Neither the defense's theory that
the murder was an effort by both to deepen their relationship nor the
prosecution's theory that money to pay off gambling debts and a desire
by Loeb to "have something" on Leopold in order to counter Leopold's
unwanted demands for sex, are likely accurate. What is clearest about
the motives is that Leopold's attraction to Loeb was his primary reason
for participating in the crime. Leopold later wrote that "Loeb's
friendship was necessary to me-- terribly necessary" and that his
motive, "to the extent that I had one, was to please Dick." For Loeb,
the crime was more an escape from the ordinary; an interesting
intellectual exercise.
���� Murder was a necessary element in their plan to commit the
perfect crime. The two teenagers spent hours discussing and refining a
plan that included kidnapping the child of a wealthy parents, demanding
a ransom, and collecting the ransom after it was thrown off a moving
train as it passed a designated point. Neither Loeb nor Leopold relished
the idea of murdering their kidnap victim, but they thought it critical
to minimizing their likelihood of being identified as the kidnappers.
Their victim turned out to be an acquaintance of the two boys, Bobby
Franks.
���� Franks was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. On
May 21, 1924 at about five o'clock in the afternoon, Bobby Franks was
walking home from school when a gray Winton automobile pulled up near
him. Loeb asked Franks to come over to the car, asked him to get in the
car to discuss a tennis racquet, then killed him with a chisel as the
two drove off. (Though most evidence points to Loeb as the actual
killer, there is some dispute about this, as there is over the time of
the killing. Some have suggested that Franks was sexually molested, then
killed later.) Leopold and Loeb drove their rented car to a marshland
near the Indiana line, where they stripped Franks naked, poured
hydrochloric acid over his body to make identification more difficult,
then stuffed the body in a concrete drainage culvert. The boys returned
to the Loeb home where they burned Franks' clothing in a basement fire.
That evening Mrs. Franks received a phone call from Leopold, who
identified himself as "George Johnson." Leopold told Franks that her boy
had been kidnapped, but was unharmed, and that she should expect a
ransom note soon. The next morning the Franks family received a special
delivery letter asking that they immediately secure $10,000 in old,
unmarked bills and telling them to expect further instructions that
afternoon. Leopold ("George Johnson") called Jacob Franks, Bobby's
father, at three o'clock to tell him a taxi cab was about to arrive at
his home and that he should take it to a specified drugstore in South
Chicago. Just as Franks headed out to the Yellow Cab, a second call
came, this one from the police, spoiling hope that the perfect crime
would be executed. The body of Bobby Franks had been identified; a
laborer happened to see a flash of what turned out to be a foot through
the the shrubbery covering the open culvert where the body had been
placed.
���� There would have been no arrests and no trial but for what
the prosecutor called "the hand of God at work in this case." A pair of
horn-rimmed glasses were discovered with the body of Bobby Franks. The
glasses, belonging to Nathan Leopold, had slipped out of his pocket as
he struggled to hide the body. They had an unusual hinge and could be
traced to a single Chicago optometrist, who had written only three such
prescriptions, including the one to Leopold. When questioned about the
glasses, Leopold said that he must have lost them on one of his frequent
birding expeditions. He was asked by an investigator to demonstrate how
the glasses might have fallen out of his pockets, but failed after a
series of purposeful trips to dislodge the glasses from his coat.
Questioning became more intense. Leopold said that he spent the
twenty-first of May picking up girls in his car with Loeb and driving
out to Lincoln Park. Loeb, when questioned separately, confirmed
Leopold's alibi. Prosecutor's were on the verge of releasing the two
suspects when two additional pieces of evidence surfaced. First,
typewritten notes taken from a member of Leopold's law school study
group were found to match the the type from the ransom note, despite the
fact that an earlier search of the Leopold home turned up a typewriter
with unmatching type. Then came a statement from the Leopold family
chauffeur, made in the hope of establishing Nathan's innocence, that
spelled his doom. He said he was certain that the Leopold car had not
left the garage on the day of the murder.
���� Loeb confessed first, then Leopold. Their confessions
differed only on the point of who did the actual killing, with each
pointing the finger at the other. Leopold later pleaded with Loeb to
admit to killing Franks but, according to Leopold, Loeb said, "Mompsie
feels less terrible than she might, thinking you did it and I'm not
going to take that shred of comfort away from her."
���� The Loeb and Leopold families hired Clarence Darrow and
Benjamin Bachrach to represent the two boys. Nathan said his first
impression of Darrow was one of "horror", unimpressed as he was by
Darrow's unruly hair, rumpled jacket, egg-splattered shirt, suspenders,
and askew tie. His opinion of Darrow would soon change. He later
described his attorney as a great, simple, unaffected man, with a
"deep-seated, all-embracing kindliness." In his book Life Plus
Ninety-Nine Years, Leopold wrote that if asked to name the two men who
"came closest to preaching the pure essence of love" he would say Jesus
and Clarence Darrow.
���� It was Darrow's decision to change the boys' initial pleas
to the charges of murder and kidnapping from "not guilty" (suggesting a
traditional insanity defense) to "guilty." The decision was made
primarily to prevent the state from getting two opportunities to get a
death sentence. With "not guilty" pleas, the state had planned to try
the boys first on one of the two charges, both of which carried the
death penalty in Illinois, and if it failed to win a hanging on the
first charge, try again on the second. The guilty plea also meant that
the sentencing decision would be made by a judge, not by a jury.
Darrow's decision to plead the boys guilty undoubtedly was based in part
on his belief that the judge who would hear their case, John R. Caverly,
was a "kindly and discerning" man. With the public seemingly unanimous
in calling for death, Darrow did not want to face a jury. In his
summation Darrow noted, "where responsibility is divided by twelve, it
is easy to say 'away with him'; but, your honor, if these boys are to
hang, you must do it--...it must be by your cool, premeditated act,
without a chance to shift responsibility."
���� The defense hoped to build its case against death around
the testimony of four psychiatrists, called "alienists" at the time. The
best talent psychiatric talent 1924 had to offer was sought out by both
sides to examine the defendants. Even Sigmund Freud was asked to come to
Chicago for the trial, but his poor health at the time prevented the
visit. The prosecution argued that psychiatric testimony was only
admissible if the defendants claimed insanity, while the defense argued
strenuously that evidence of mental disease should be considered as a
mitigating factor in consideration of the sentence. In the most critical
ruling of the trial, Judge Caverly decided against the state's
objection, and allowed the psychiatric evidence to be introduced.
���� The trial (technically a hearing, rather than a trial,
because of the entry of guilty pleas) of Leopold and Loeb lasted just
over one month. The state presented over a hundred witnesses proving--
needlessly, in the opinion of many-- every element of the crime. The
defense presented extensive psychiatric evidence describing the
defendants' emotional immaturity, obsessions with crime and Nietzschean
philosophy, alcohol abuse, glandular abnormalities, and sexual longings
and insecurities. Lay witnesses, classmates and associates of Loeb, were
offered to prove his belligerence, inappropriate laughter, lack of
judgment, and childishness. Other lay witness testified as to Leopold's
egocentricity and argumentative nature. The state offered in rebuttal
psychiatrists who saw normal emotional responses in the boys and no
physical basis for a finding of mental abnormality.
���� On August 22, 1924, Clarence Darrow began his summation for
the defense in a "courtroom jammed to suffocation, with hundreds of men
and women rioting in the corridors outside." As a newspaper reporter
observed, the setting underscored Darrow's argument "that the court was
the only thing standing between the boys and a bloodthirsty mob." For
over twelve hours Darrow reminded Judge Caverly of the defendants'
youth, genetic inheritance, surging sexual impulses, and the many
external influences that had led them to the commission of their crime.
Never before or since the Leopold and Loeb trial has the deterministic
universe, this life of "a series of infinite chances", been so clearly
made the basis of a criminal defense. In pleading for Loeb's life Darrow
argued, " Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in mysterious
ways, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it�
ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we only play our parts. In
the words of old Omar Khayyam, we are only Impotent pieces in the game
He plays Upon this checkerboard of nights and days, Hither and thither
moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays.
What had this boy had to do with it? He was not his own father; he was
not his own mother....All of this was handed to him. He did not surround
himself with governesses and wealth. He did not make himself. And yet he
is to be compelled to pay."��� In pleading that Leopold be spared
, Darrow said, "Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance
and life and eternity upon a nineteen- year-old boy!"
���� Darrow attacked the death penalty as atavistic, saying it
"roots back to the beast and the jungle." Time and time again Darrow
challenged the notion of "an eye for an eye": "If the state in which I
live is not kinder, more humane, and more considerate than the mad act
of these two boys, I am sorry I have lived so long." Darrow told Judge
Caverly that a life sentence was punishment severe enough for the crime.
He reminded the judge how little Leopold and Loeb would have to look
forward to in the long days, months, and years ahead: "In all the
endless road you tread there's nothing but the night." When Darrow
finally ended his appeal, tears were streaming down the face of Judge
Caverly and many other courtroom spectators. One reporter wrote, "There
was scarcely any telling where his voice had finished and where silence
had begun. It lasted for a minute, two minutes."
���� State's Attorney Robert Crowe closed for the prosecution.
He sarcastically attacked the arguments of "the distinguished gentlemen
whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning
whose health thieves inquire before they go out and commit a crime."
Addressing Leopold, Crowe said, "I wonder now, Nathan, whether you think
there is a God or not. I wonder whether you think it is pure accident
that this disciple of Nietzsche's philosophy dropped his glasses or
whether it was an act of Divine Providence to visit upon your miserable
carcasses the wrath of God." (Leopold, much later, said he wondered the
same thing.) He heaped ridicule on Darrow's attempt to blame the crime
on anyone and anything but the defendants: "My God, if one of them had a
harelip I suppose Darrow would want me to apologize for having them
indicted." Crowe called the defense psychiatrists "The Three Wise Men
from the East" and accused one of them of being "in his second
childhood" and "prostituting his profession." He reserved his strongest
language for the two defendants, who he referred to as "cowardly
perverts", "snakes", "atheists", "spoiled smart alecs", and "mad dogs."
For Crowe, this was a premeditated crime committed by two remorseless
defendants, and the appropriate punishment was obvious. The "real
defense" in the case, according to Crowe, was "Clarence Darrow and his
peculiar philosophy of life." It ought not be a defense, suggested
Crowe, who closed by asking Judge Caverly to "execute justice and
righteousness in the land."
���� Two weeks later Caverly announced his decision. He called
the murder "a crime of singular atrocity." Caverly said that his
"judgment cannot be affected" by the causes of crime and that it was
"beyond the province of this court" to "predicate ultimate
responsibility for human acts." Nonetheless, Caverly said that "the
consideration of the age of the defendants" and the possible benefits to
criminology that might come from future study of them persuaded him that
life in prison, not death, was the better punishment. He said that he
was doing them no favor: "To the offenders, particularly of the type
they are, the prolonged years of confinement may well be the severest
form of retribution and expiation."
���� Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were moved to the Joliet
penitentiary. In 1936, Loeb was slashed and killed with a razor in a
showroom fight with James Day, another inmate. Leopold rushed to the
prison hospital to be at his old friend's bedside as he died. Day
claimed that he was resisting Loeb's sexual advances, while prison
officials called it a deliberate and unprovoked attack. Day was
acquitted by a jury. Leopold managed to keep intellectually active in
prison. He taught in the prison school, mastered twenty-seven foreign
languages, worked as an x-ray technician in the prison hospital,
reorganized the prison library, volunteered to be tested with an
experimental malaria vaccine, and designed a new system of prison
education. In the 1950's, an elderly and now retired Robert Crowe
reportedly offered to write a letter to the Illinois Parole Board urging
his release. In 1958, after thirty-four years of confinement, Leopold
was released from prison. To escape the publicity accompanying the
release of Compulsion, a movie based on the 1924 crime (and which
Leopold and his lawyer, Elmer Gertz, challenged in a lawsuit as an
invasion of privacy), Leopold migrated to Puerto Rico. He earned a
master's degree, taught mathematics, and worked in hospitals and church
missions. He wrote a book entitled The Birds of Puerto Rico. Despite
saying in a 1960 interview that he was still deeply in love with Richard
Loeb, he married. Leopold said he often found himself wondering during
his years in Puerto Rico at what point the thirty-four dark years in
prison became balanced by the subsequent sunshine of freedom. Leopold
died following ten days of hospitalization on August 30, 1971.� The
next morning his corneas were removed.� One was given to a man, the
other to a woman.
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/leopold.htm
